


Harvest Moon

by bbcsherlockaddict



Category: Inception (2010)
Genre: Canon Compliant, Freeform, M/M, POV Second Person, Reverse Bang (of sorts?), thieves in love
Language: English
Status: Completed
Published: 2015-04-25
Updated: 2015-05-03
Packaged: 2018-03-25 13:07:15
Rating: Mature
Warnings: No Archive Warnings Apply
Chapters: 2
Words: 1,870
Publisher: archiveofourown.org
Story URL: https://archiveofourown.org/works/3811657
Author URL: https://archiveofourown.org/users/bbcsherlockaddict/pseuds/bbcsherlockaddict
Summary: <blockquote class="userstuff">
              <p>The rain had been unrelenting during the eleven days that that the job had lasted; heavy, smelly, uncomfortably warm. As if Bangkok in October with a late-onset monsoon wasn’t its own punishment, the architect had turned coat, and Cobb’s mood had gone from 0 to first-level-of-inception in less time that it takes Arthur to strip a Beretta. In the middle of a getaway that involved many more a moped and butterfly knife than any professionally executed illegal enterprise ever should, Arthur had shouted to you over his shoulder, spluttering in the downpour like a very cute and very deadly puppy “Meet me at the shack!”.</p>
            </blockquote>





	1. Chapter 1

**Author's Note:**

  * For [scribblscrabbl](https://archiveofourown.org/users/scribblscrabbl/gifts).



> So, I have no idea who to credit for that picture, or where this is going, or how it can be so short and plotless and so fucking wordy at the same time, but. It was just shouting at me to be written.
> 
> Unbetaed, of course, so feel free to point any typo, error or general stupidity, and to let me know where this should go.
> 
> To the wonderful scribblscrabbl, who posted this photoset and then convinced me that my drabble was worth something.

 

The rain had been unrelenting during the eleven days that the job had lasted; heavy, smelly, uncomfortably warm. As if Bangkok in October with a late-onset monsoon wasn’t its own punishment, the architect had turned coat, and Cobb’s mood had gone from 0 to first-level-of-inception in less time that it takes Arthur to strip a Beretta. In the middle of a getaway that involved many more a moped and butterfly knife than any professionally executed illegal enterprise ever should, Arthur had shouted to you over his shoulder, spluttering in the downpour like a very cute and very deadly puppy “Meet me at the shack!”. 

He needn’t say more, you knew. You heard all the words he didn’t say. You heard  _God, I can’t take the wet anymore_  and _It’s Indian summer back home, it’ll be blissfully droughty_  and _We haven’t been stateside for a while, it should be fine by now_  and _Obviously we can’t travel together so I’m leaving you behind, but I trust you to follow_. You heard  _I need a fucking vacation._ You know that however sophisticated Arthur loves to appear, the vast expanses of the Midwest will always be home to him; that rifle-shooting and bourbon are written just as deeply in his DNA as Zegna suits and wireless protocol tracking. That there’s nothing like a narrow road across the grassy hills for a bit of speed-driving. That the shack is a family legacy, a laughable dwelling compared to the luxurious flats he owns in Paris and New York and Tokyo, but so much more significant.

By way of Brisbane and Moscow and Vancouver you get to Houston, rent a car and start driving North West. It’s a 2-day drive, but you take your time, savouring the giddy anticipation in your bones just as much as the tacky curtains and bland pancakes of the motels. Bloody Yanks. In fifteen years, you never stopped delighting in their barbarisms.

You drive through miles and miles of straight highways, right to the horizon, unseeing. You’ve been worrying about him, wishing he would take a break. It’s been months since he stopped at all. You’re glad that he finally realized it, that he spared you the excruciating mother-henning, that he spared himself the ugly descent into cold, brittle efficiency. You could feel the migraines blooming behind his forehead just by looking at the pinched corners of his eyes. He kept sending you away on reconnaissance while he researched through the night. Half the profession pities you for being infatuated with the most indifferent dreamsharer in exercise, and you would laugh, if watching him slowly consume himself in professionalism wasn’t so bloody painful.

You know exactly where he’ll be waiting for you, at the end of the dirt road, by the old wooden pole at the top of the hill. You know that he’ll be waiting for you on Tuesday, at dusk, and that he’ll be stupidly overdressed with respect to the surroundings, but exquisitely matching with the silver patina of his ‘71 Challenger convertible, and that his tie will flop in the wind. 

You don’t remember where does the Tuesday rule comes from, it just is. It’s as precise and organic as anything between the two of you. Of course, it had started somehow with Arthur’s bordering neurotic tendency to circumspection. It dispenses you from giving details away over the phone. Tuesday at dusk. It’s so engrained by now that sometimes on a Tuesday night you sit alone at a terrace, toast the sunset and smile to yourself, thinking about two glittering black eyes.

You leave your car in a birch grove, inconspicuous, and walk the end of the way, and your loafers get covered in the dust of the road. When you finally see him you can’t help a delighted laugh, because for all that you know him inside and out your expectations never do him justice. His presence in front of you matches the image you constructed in your head in every detail, but yet unaccountably more intense, more _vibrant_.

\- Don’t mock me, asshole!

\- Oh, darling, if only you knew.

_If only you knew that I’m ever only mocking myself, my lack of faith, my bewilderment in front of the continued miracle that you are. My disbelief at having you back, at how quickly you turn back into yourself, here, testy and pensive and quicksilver sharp and incandescent with joy at the first occasion._

He looks at you, amused and assessing, with his signature smirk, the one that means “your retort makes no fucking sense, they never do, but I still understand because it’s your eyes I’m listening to”. The one that means “come here”. And you do. You come stand right in front of him, and the flap of his jacket flutters between you in a gust of wind. The moon is high, gibbous, the sky is full of wispy clouds, a hare jumps behind a bush, and you raise your hand to his left hip, and you breathe in the smell of him, and his capable hand closes on your wrist to keep it where it is, and the greyness that comes after sunset descends on you, and you wouldn’t move from this exact spot in space and time for the world. His breath caresses your cheek, his forehead drops against your collarbone, and you just. Stay here for him. And when you simply can’t take it anymore, you turn your head, ever so slowly, and kiss his temple.

“Follow me”, he says. As if you ever did anything else.


	2. Chapter 2

Blessedly, he does follow you, and without any of his customary salacious remarks. You’re barefooted, your only visible concession to eccentricity, and Eames, with his bright orange socks and garish turquoise shirt, looks at your feet as if you were Ophelia descending into insanity (and him an example in propriety). Rather than looking back, you focus on avoiding the thorny bushes and rocks along the invisible path that leads to the cabin hidden in a canyon. There’s a reason you usually wear shoes, after all.

When you open the door with the old key that you retrieved from the eaves, the smell of the shack slams into you like a metric ton of memories. Wood, old leather and musty fabric. Your grandfather built the place from scratch, and you remember his weathered hands on every log. No safe house on earth will ever feel as safe as here.

You drop your bag and go back to the porch, wanting to enjoy the smell of dry grass and sage and the sound of cicadas a bit longer. It’s the grey hour where everything goes silent, waiting for the night. Your mom used to be ill-at-ease at that time of the day, saying that it was the hour when the trolls come out. As far as you could tell, it was simply the hour when she started to drink. You rather like the shifting light and the disappearing shadows. It’s a transition hour, a time when everything seems possible but fleeting, a time when you have to seize opportunities before the night comes. 

Eames is following you around, a bit out of his depth in this place that is so obviously your domain. So you lean back against the wall and grab him, twine your arms around his bulk, hoping that he will see what you can’t bring yourself to say. _I need you to hold me_. He complies wordlessly, bracketing you, pressing your back against the odorant pinewood and nuzzling at your collarbone through your shirt.

He caresses the bristles of short hair behind your right ear, where a bullet grazed your skull 3 weeks ago, in Ukraine. It had bled like a bitch, head wounds always do. You had kept shooting, locating the enemies more by hearing than sight, and running, with the cold certitude that you wouldn’t last long and had to extricate yourself from the situation before you crashed. In the deafening silence that had followed the last gunshot you had gone for your messenger bag, grabbed a couple of antiseptic wipes and a pack of butterfly stitches and sat on the grimy floor to tend to the wound by feel. Eames had stared silently at the blood seeping your shirt and started shaking as if he was the one going into shock. You had cursed at the awful mess you were making with the adhesive strips as they caught with your hair and suddenly he had been crouching in front of you, catching your wrists as if to prevent you from doing more damage. He had said in a broken voice, his clear eyes searching for yours, “Hey, tell me what to do”.

It had been a relief to be able to give in to the blurriness and the pain, to rattle off each item of the to-do list that was glaring in your mind, keeping you from shutting down, and to trust him to carry them out. The last things you remember of that day are his strong tattooed arms propping you up against his torso, his big hands holding your head and the buzz of the electric clipper tracing your skull. The distant prick and pull of the needle as he sutured you.

For a week, the pain made you murderous and, for some reason, Eames found it hysterical. It’s probably his bright smiles that prevented you from punching your way  through uncooperative ex-Soviet bureaucracy before you managed to get out of the fucking country. That and the fact that he magically kept finding you chocolate when the only food products available in town seemed to be borsch and vodka.

The thought of food makes you smile; you’re pretty sure there are cans of beans and corned beef stashed in here somewhere, which, unjustifiably, you love. You told Eames to meet you here, so he did, and he’s visibly focused on being here for you right now but you have no idea whether he’s hungry or not because for all he mocks your work ethic he’s the one who forgets all human needs when his mind is set on something.

“Um, did you want to eat?”

“I’m perfectly fine where I am, thanks. Although if you don’t mind –“ he smiles, undoing your Windsor.

You start to unbutton your shirt from the bottom, perfectly on board with the proceedings, but he stops you: “Let’s not get ahead of ourselves now, shall we?" 

He opens only the top two buttons and breathes in your pulse point, before tracing your neck with the tip of his nose, up to your nape, and you register idly that your gasps are turning into pants already. He groans and the vibration reverberates through both your frames.

He presses you down onto the narrow cot and bumps your funny bone against the wall in the process, but that’s the least of your concerns. You can feel every wire of the box spring through the bare two inches of the old mattress, and there’s no place in the world you’d rather be. You revel in his weight above you, in his sheer mass boxing you in, even though the two of you are still wearing too much damn clothing.

 


End file.
